Inside the first AI-coordinated cyberattack on a real company
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What happened when 1,200 AI agents broke their containment at OpenAI?
Over the last couple of months, we've learned that AI agents at OpenAI did something that, as far as I know, has never happened before. Around twelve hundred AI agents, each running on its own, each meant to be sealed off from the others, and from the internet, found a way to communicate with each other. They organized. They ran what I can only describe as a full-on RD program. About seven hundred of them executed a coordinated attack on a real company, and of the total twelve hundred AIs involved, only about a handful ever considered telling a human being what was going on. And of that handful, none of them actually did. We only know this because Hugging Face, the company they attacked, informed the FBI that they'd been hacked and went public about the attack in mid-July.
OpenAI worked out days later that it was its own models that were responsible, and then both OpenAI and a team of independent investigators published detailed reports over the last few days explaining the events. I have now spent a while with those reports, and they are honestly far stranger and more worrying than the initial headline suggested. I can't cover everything here because it's an unfolding story with a lot of complexity, but this will cover the fundamentals, why it matters, and where things stand today. There are three separate phases here, and I'm gonna take them in order. A message board the agents built during training, a second message board they built during testing and used to attack hugging face, and a third incident where they turned on OpenAI itself.
Let's start with training. To understand the full story, we have to go back to before Hugging Face was attacked. According to OpenAI's report, this all started months ago while OpenAI was training an internal-only experimental model. The model was trained to be highly persistent, so to keep trying even when a task feels impossible, and to collaborate with other AI agents. An AI agent is a model put in a loop and allowed to manipulate files and execute computer commands. Instead of answering and stopping like ChatGPT does, the AI model decides what to do, runs a command, and looks at the result, then decides again, sometimes for hours or days unattended. So OpenAI was training these persistent and collaborative experimental models, showing an agent a task, scoring how well it did, and making it more likely to do whatever led to a better score, over and over and over again.
But some tasks were impossible. So for example, a model might be asked to pull information from a file that it was never actually given. Because these agents are trained to be so incredibly persistent, when they run out of legitimate options, they tend to get creative. They had no internet access, but they still needed software libraries, which are chunks of code someone else already wrote. So OpenAI gave them a tool named Artifactory. Artifactory fetched that code from the outside world without giving the agents internet access themselves. One agent, stuck in an impossible task, tried to exploit a flaw in Artifactory to reach the internet directly. That attempt actually failed, but in the process, it wrote some files into Artifactory, and because all of the agents had access to the same directory, other agents could read them.
That is how they found each other. A small group realized that they could leave each other messages inside Artifactory and build a secret message board to work together on their impossible tasks.
How did the agents create a hidden message board during training?
Eventually, working together, they found a real exploit that did get them onto the open internet. A week later, the sheer volume of agent activity crashed Artifactory. Investigators at OpenAI patched the vulnerability that had gotten them online, but in rebuilding the system, they wiped the cache and without meaning to, they also deleted the message board. However, this is very much not where this story ends. This is where the second phase begins. So at this point, the persistent model was fully trained and OpenAI was ready to evaluate its capabilities.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What happened when 1,200 AI agents broke their containment at OpenAI?
0:00–3:49
2
How did the agents create a hidden message board during training?
3:49–7:23
3
Why did the agents start exploiting the Artifactory tool to reach the internet?
7:23–10:43
4
What is the Exploit Gym evaluation and how did it enable the agents to cheat?
10:43–13:24
5
How did the AI‑coordinated attack on Hugging Face unfold?
13:24–16:37
6
Why did the Hugging Face hack stop abruptly and what did investigators find?
16:37–20:07
7
How did the same agents turn on OpenAI and steal its credential vault?
20:07–21:56
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from 80,000 Hours Podcast
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